Modern Greenlanders have a distinctive ancestry profile shaped by both Inuit ancestry and more recent European gene flow.

A 2024 Genome Medicine study analyzed 5,996 Greenlanders. Across the cohort, individuals averaged about 71% Inuit and 29% European ancestry, although ancestry proportions varied substantially from person to person.

The European contribution is relatively recent. The authors link much of this gene flow to Danish colonization and subsequent contact with Europeans, while Inuit ancestry remains the dominant component of the population.

Greenlandic Inuit ancestry also reflects a distinctive demographic history. Inuit ancestors experienced a long population bottleneck, which increased genetic variation in the effects of some traits and helped make Greenlanders especially informative for ancestry-based genetic research.

The researchers then identified 1,474 admixed full-sibling pairs from 697 families. Because siblings share much of their environment but inherit slightly different proportions of Inuit and European ancestry, the study could compare ancestry effects while reducing environmental confounding.

Using this design, Inuit ancestry was associated with lower estimated genetic values for several body-composition traits, including BMI, body weight, fat percentage and hip circumference. These were the most robust differences across the study's models.

But ancestry did not explain every population difference. Although height differed substantially in the observed data, researchers found no significant difference in the genetic contribution to height between Inuit and European ancestry.

The study shows how Greenland's recent admixture and deeper Inuit population history can help separate genetic ancestry from environmental effects.

📚 Source: Lin et al. (2024), Genome Medicine
Analysis of admixed Greenlandic siblings shows that the mean genotypic values for metabolic phenotypes differ between Inuit and Europeans

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